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A couple of days ago, when I got to the swimming pool for my morning workout, there was a lady in the change room I had never met before. She commented, “You just missed thunder guy!” I was puzzled, “Who or what is thunder guy?” “There is this guy who sounds like thunder when he swims.” she replied. Then she continued. “But Rachel (name changed) is still in the pool. You can enjoy all the waves she makes. She has been told by several of us but she still makes huge waves.” Then the lady continued to grumble about having to go out into the cold and snow.

A little confused about the “wave problem” I entered the pool area. There were two men and two women in the pool. I wondered which was Rachel as I could not see that either one of the ladies was creating an unreasonable amount of waves. One of them I had seen many times before. She always ambitiously swims laps for 30-40 minutes. Was that supposed to be her?

I eyed her waves. It had never before occurred to me to feel disturbed by her swimming style. Admittedly, her crawl wasn’t the smoothest but I wish I had her stamina. As I was suspiciously focusing on the waviness of the water, it suddenly dawned on me. I had almost fallen for one of these “naysayers”, one of those people who seem to be unhappy, dissatisfied, or even angry most of the time and cast gloom and disharmony over every situation.

It is easy to walk away when the negative person is a stranger at the pool or even a friend. We can minimize the contact or choose no contact at all. It is so much more challenging when the discontent or angry person is a family member. We might not be able to completely walk out on them; yet, we need to manage our energy around them carefully.

Anger is an interesting vibration; it is—under certain conditions—catching, like any other energy. A person’s big and happy laugh can be catching, so is anger. It all depends on our own frequency at a given time. It’s like two tuning forks. If an A tuning fork, vibrating at 440 Hz, comes close to another A tuning fork, the second A tuning fork begins to vibrate with it. If the A tuning fork comes close to another tuning fork which is tuned to a different frequency, nothing happens.

When someone comes into our field and vibrates at the level of anger, and we have some anger in us as well, we tend to respond like the A tuning fork. We either get angry at the person or angry with the person.

In general it feels much better to be angry with somebody instead of having somebody be angry at us, or us be angry at them. That’s how angry people manage to get others all riled up and on their side. Anger unites two or more people while it destroys the relationship with an outsider who has become the black sheep everybody is angry at. Knowing this, we have a third choice. We can choose to let go of our anger and not participate any longer in someone’s angry behaviour.

I have certainly had different moments of frustration in my life that made me feel angry. The more primitive parts of our brain, which have the function to keep us safe and which respond faster than the more advanced parts of our brain, sense danger—or in other words feel attacked—and we instinctively and instantly responded with anger.

Usually, there is something else underneath the anger, for example feeling unappreciated, sad, afraid or vulnerable. Our initial response is automatic. However, if we continue to feel angry beyond that initial response, we have made a choice; the choice to stay in this low vibration. We can get out of that vibration by examining what is really going on for us, making amends and apologizing to others who took the brunt of our anger, but most importantly by ensuring our needs are met in the future and our more vulnerable emotions are taken care of.

The same applies when the anger is brought to us. If we choose to listen to the angry person who is trying to get us to feel as angry as they are, the waves in the pool begin to seem huge. The world suddenly is filled with Thunder Guys and Rude Rachels. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather focus on how fortunate I am to even be swimming in the pool rather than how big the waves are and how rude the rest of the world seems to be.

Angelika, 905-286-9466, greendoorrelaxation@yahoo.ca

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